The Retro Breakdown

Sorry about the unannounced hiatus last week! Travel and the holiday got in the way. Anyway, TW is back from Korea and so now we're catching up on things and apparently we're sports fans now? Pang! is a fun arcade game that you may know under the name "Buster Bros.," and you almost definitely do NOT know by the name "Pomping World." But it's worth a play! Send us an email to read on the show! ther...

A completely forgettable Game Boy Ninja Turtles experience is saved by a bizarrely-written manual and some excellent Michiru Yamane tunes. Also, TW has friends in Korea that keep independently taking him to the same places, we have a mostly spoiler-free discussion of the end of Infernax, and we weigh in on the enjoyable nonsense that is Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. Send us an email to read on the s...

More Korea misadventures from TW, some God of War talk from Tom, and the inevitable bit of Dragon Ball discussion from the both of us peppers this week's show. Also, the first 3 executive orders we would make as President of Video Games (hint: almost none of them have to do with actual games). Pilotwings 64 is a bizarre game and for some reason we spend the first 10 minutes talking about the exagg...

TW's Korea adventures continue with a mint chocolate burger that is a real thing, and you can watch the full reaction at the following YouTube link: https://youtu.be/xk2AHOZVIlo We also discuss our hype to hate-watch Sonic Frontiers and revel in its inevitable weirdness, and there's a story in there about accidentally taking a shot of vodka at a grocery store. End theme is the Single Player theme...

Please bear with some issues with sound quality and attentiveness quality this week! TW is exhausted having just arrived in South Korea, and is not using usual equipment, so the mic quality is less-than-perfect and also I'm exhausted. But anyway, we discuss Spider-Man, the MCU in general, trying to explain video games to non-gamers, and the odd feeling of being in that "in-between" skill gap where...

We have a game this week! Perhaps the most weirdly obscure game we've ever played on the channel, this week we hit Riding Fight, a Taito arcade game from 1992 which is a beat 'em up but on future rocket hoverboards. It sounds like a disaster, but is actually fantastic! Other topics - Retroarch is a pain to use, so is Windows 11, and music we'd like to have as our life soundtracks. Send us an email...

EDIT: Original audio accidentally was missing a bunch of tracks, so it sounded like I was basically having a conversation with myself. Please download the episode again, the corrected audio should be available now! - TW Hideki Kamiya has banned himself from Twitter, Tom and TW have differing approaches to holiday decorations, and Lost Judgment is over (again). It's another podcast with no game, bu...

Welcome to the Retro Breakdown, the show where sometimes there is no retro breakdown! We've decided that once in a while, we're going to have to shift into simple "talk show" format to give us more time to play longer games, or simply when we're short on time. So there's no game this week, only talk! This won't be a permanent change (we already know what we're playing next week!) but we felt like...

It's American football season, which is vaguely of interest to me and probably very few listeners, but that's okay, because this is barely a football game anyway. It's more of a licensed Saturday morning cartoon game, but like, the kind your mom didn't really approve of. It's also just legitimately not very good. And speaking of not very good, Google Stadia has finally arrived at its inevitable de...

Yes, the sound quality is weird this week, it should be back to normal next week, I promise! Jessi is back for another podcast as Tom is out and my computer is in pieces! There's a lot of real life stuff happening this week, which we will explain in detail, and then talk about Claymates, which is NOT Clayfighter (but it turns out is made by the same people)! Send us an email to read on the show! t...

We break new ground this week by trying out our first ever fangame (aside from the SMZ3 randomizer, sort of), which is a reimagining of Castlevania in the classic Doom engine! Also, basically every game company on Earth had a digital showcase this week, so we talk about a small sliver of that, but honestly it mostly comes back to the three new Like a Dragon games coming out, including a long-await...

Tom is out this week, so Jessi joins us again for a podcast featuring the May 2001 iteration of the Official U.S. Playstation Magazine Demo Disc! It featured 9 playable demos, 8 of which actually worked! Join us as we work through first impressions of: Disney's The Emperor's New Groove Cool Boarders 2001 Ape Escape The Legend of Dragoon Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver MediEvil II Syphon Filter 2 (sort...

Welcome to the new, hopefully consistently shorter format of the Retro Breakdown, where we do basically all the same stuff as before, just for less time. This week, topics include TW's newly-chipped front tooth, Rumbleverse, Metal Gear Solid, and how different Rocky 1 is from its sequels. Send us an email to read on the show! theretrobreakdown@gmail.com TW's Discord: https://discord.gg/dTrBruG Pod...

This week we try to do a quick podcast and it still ends up being almost two hours. I blame Wave Race 64 for being unnecessarily good, and a technical marvel for its time. It is actually STUNNING, even now. Send us an email to read on the show! theretrobreakdown@gmail.com TW's Discord: https://discord.gg/dTrBruG Podcast games streamed live at: twitch.tv/timewanderer TW on YouTube: https://www.yout...

This week, TW shamelessly shills a marketing project he worked on, Tom jumps into Live A Live, and Nintendo joins the "corporate sexual harassment" club and every single corporation is terrible. Later, TW grapples with the fact that he didn't get good enough to like Guardian Heroes as much as he wanted to, even though it's probably still objectively really good. Send us an email to read on the sho...

TW drops another "Weird Anime Review" (though this one isn't quite as off-the-rails as Birdie Wing), we discuss game ratings scales ranging from GamePro to a random public-access gaming TV show, and we talk how much is too much when it comes to game developer/publisher malfeasance. The answer is depressingly nuanced. You know what's NOT nuanced, though? Crusader of Centy, a game that looks like it...

By listener request (thanks Andrew), we're doing Riven, one of the few PC games we've played for the show thus far! Also, Tom reveals the arcane secret to his elevated gameplay times, David Cage gets to make a Star Wars game, and TW discusses the time management philosophy that leads him to never watching movies. Send us an email to read on the show! theretrobreakdown@gmail.com TW's Discord: https...

This week, TW can't not talk about Xenoblade Chronicles 2 again (yes, 3 just came out, catching up takes time), but also we talk about Red-Ring Xbox 360 home repair methods, games that could have used more time in development, and saving the wrong person in Mass Effect. Also, Journey to Silius has a great history behind its development, and a great soundtrack, and that's all I'll say about it here...

I forgot I watched Birdie Wing this week, so I completely derail a perfectly good Pokemon Puzzle League discussion to talk about this show that  is incredibly confused and wants to be some combination of mafia-driven Battle Golfer Yui and a school-life rom-com with strong lesbian energy. It's terrible and I love it. Other topics include a Cyberpunk 2077 post-mortem, being disqualified from to...

The discussion of Tecmo's successful-for-some-reason-and-immediately-forgotten-about Mighty Bomb Jack, surprisingly, has absolutely nothing at all to do with the the later discussion of throwing controllers, but both conversations do in fact happen. Also on tap is talk about Fire Emblem: Three Hopes, overwhelming amount of systems in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and a weird chain of thoughts that goes...

Yes, this is the "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" game, and YES we talk about it and ABSOLUTELY YES we play the song. But boy, it sure is a good thing this game is remembered for something, because it is the most mediocre, "just okay" game we've played in a while. We also talk about the concept of the gaming "time vampire," Yuki Naka's weird pettiness, and the Metal Gear Rising SGDQ run controvers...

A last-minute swap brings us Target Earth, a game about mechs and stuff, I don't know. It's called Assault Suit Leynos in Japan, where it is the first in a series of games that has a very confusing naming convention. Other topics: EA still wants you to think single-player games are dead, Nintendo nearly misses their window to put out some games in June, SGDQ is over, and nobody remembers about Red...

What's next on Switch Online's Nintendo 64 service? We talk about the best and worst of what they could add, and which rights might be too expensive for them to bother. Somehow this leads us to talk about Charlie Blast's Territory, and the Army Men RTS. Other topics include the novelty of Switch Sports wearing thin, the Halo Juneteeth debacle, and what games could use more or less story. And then...

The new TMNT game is out, there's probably a new Nintendo Direct coming soon, and TW initially stopped at NieR ending A. Also, Kusogrande 7 has begun, and TW got a Top Gun game co-designed by Don Mattrick, which is hilarious. Meanwhile, Blaster Master is a fun game with problems that lays an interesting foundation but is far too concerned with wasting your time to fully deliver on it. It is, howev...

We have a lot of catching up to do! We recap what we've been playing for the last month, take two pieces of listener mail, and talk about Fire Emblem Heroes, Cedar Point (the amusement park), and what in the world "European Extreme" means. There's a lot. We talk about a lot for a long time. And then we talk about pinball. The NES game Pinball is the general focus of the podcast today, but also jus...